The “drama of existence”: sources and scope sign, “Abandon Shame All Who Enter Here” hangs over the cell-bars
where these reenactments take place. And while all of this unfolds as a
grotesque, carnivalesque spectacle, amplified “military” voices inces-
santly drone out exhortations for patriotism, discipline, civic-mindedness
and moral probity from loudspeakers rigged up throughout the prison.
These exhortations are the catechism of BAI, the “Battle Against Indis-
cipline” project of the military regime outside the walls of the prison.
These BAI exhortations achieve a particularly potent satiric effect by
their juxtaposition with the most stunning of the numerous “c.v.’s” staged
by Commander Hyacinth and his cohorts. In this “c.v.,” a new inmate,
a small-time drug trafficker on the run from his bosses in the criminal
underworld, sets out to show that the sermonizing leaders of the “BAI”
in the inner core of the “Eternal Ruling Council” operate the state as
a cartel of big-time, big-league drug traffickers with relays and contacts
around the world, including and especially the Pakistan of General Zia
ul Haq. “Decree,” as revealed in this “c.v.,” is really the product of
the determination of these military drug barons to wipe out the pre-
sumptuous civilians who would dare not only to encroach on the turf
of the military drug barons and their Pakistani principals, but actually
pull off hefty heists from state protected conduits. Thus, in this wickedly
parodic “c.v.,” one of the characters is a Wing Commander, one of the
military zealots and a member of the “Eternal Ruling Council.” He is
out on the trail of a stolen diplomatic bag containing a huge shipment
of cocaine; unbeknownst to him, his civilian partner in business is the
perpetrator of this heist. Gradually and inexorably, through dialogue,
songs and dances, the hunter becomes the hunted and this prepares us
for the astonishing twist at the end of the play: the three condemned
civilian drug traffickers are led off to their execution; simultaneously, the
Wing Commander, the scion of absolute power and infallibility, meets a
gruesome fate as a late-night victim of a sacrificial ritual at one of the
crossroads of the city, a ritual sacrifice calculated to mobilize the powers
of the occult to aid the business of running the state – the “business” we
have just seen dramatized in the “c.v.”
It would be a reduction of the scope of the ferocious antimilitarism
ofFrom Ziato see its social vision only in terms of the exposure of the
hypocrisies and the mental and spiritual emptiness of Nigeria’s military
dictators. True, this stands out explicitly in the twists and turns of the
play’s plot and songs, but what is far more telling in the overall impact
of the drama is Soyinka’s mobilization of the visual, verbal and gestural
repertoire of popular festivity and hilarity as sources of resistance to the